The Big Ten’s “big plan” for a four team playoff

The Chicago Tribune first reported earlier this week that the Big Ten is ready to push for a four team playoff system in D-I football that would take the top four from the BCS bowl pool and have semifinals on the campus of the higher seeds. The championship game would then be bidded out to venues and cities like the Super Bowl.

In the wake of Alabama and LSU’s rematch, which was the third lowest in terms of TV rankings for BCS title games, the Big Ten may start getting some traction with their idea.

In 2008, the SEC proposed a Plus-One scenario, somewhat of a four-team playoff, during BCS discussions, and the ACC supported it. But with the Big Ten, Pac-10, Big 12, Big East and Notre Dame disapproving, the plan never got off the ground and that’s understandable.

The SEC has dominated the BCS landscape for the last several years and the only way conferences like the Big Ten, (which has struggled the last two years in bowl games), stand a shot at a national title is to push for a playoff system and hope a school like Michigan, Ohio State, even Nebraska, could win the Big Ten conference and grab one of those top four spots.

I think Nebraska A.D. Tom Osborne said it perfectly…that in fact, no system will be perfect unless it includes a higher number of teams that make the playoffs. “Everyone who looks at the plus-one model realizes that if you have four teams in play, you’re still going to have the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth teams saying, ‘We got a bad deal, we should be one of those four teams,'” he said. “So there will be continual unrest until you have some kind of a much larger playoff.”